Toscanini Favorite

The U.S. opera season gets off to a fortissimo start in San Francisco this week. The opening Lohengrin will star a new Swedish tenor named Set Svanholm and the Metropolitan Opera's Astrid Varnay. In the orchestra pit will be 47-year-old, parrot-nosed William Steinberg, a favorite conductor of the paladin of all conductors, Arturo Toscanini.

One day in 1933 Steinberg found his dismissal notice scrawled on the blackboard of the Frankfurt Opera House. All about him were other Jewish musicians discharged from opera and symphony orchestras. Steinberg organized the best of them into a Juedische Kulturbund orchestra, which he conducted for two years before Jewish audiences.

When the Nazis ordered the Kulturbund to perform only in secluded synagogues, Steinberg took its best musicians to Palestine, where he and Polish Violinist Bronislaw Hubermann formed the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. Hubermann invited Arturo Toscanini to conduct the first public concert in Tel Aviv. Toscanini listened to a few well-rehearsed bars, nodded his approval and mumbled: "Molto bene [very good]."

Two years later Steinberg came to New York as associate conductor of the NBC Symphony--and became famous among orchestra men as the one & only conductor from whom Toscanini invited criticism. With Toscanini's blessing Steinberg was appointed conductor of the San Francisco Opera in 1944, and of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1945. He built the feeble third-rate Philharmonic into a strong second-rate orchestra in just one year.

Like Toscanini, Steinberg never uses a score. Though his performances lack the Maestro's tuning-fork luster, he conducts with much the same bombastic vigor. To give cues, he waggles his head like an angry steer. At opera rehearsals he brays himself hoarse singing the leading roles stopping occasionally to munch a dry slice of pumpernickel.

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